WALTERS: Pension plan real or mere ploy?

A few years ago, the California Public Employees' Retirement
System's chief actuary gave what he assumed was a private briefing
and described the huge system's liabilities as "unsustainable."

A journalist who heard the briefing published an account, thus
letting everyone else in on CalPERS' secret.

Officially, of course, the union-dominated CalPERS still
contends that its unfunded liabilities are small, and it can
finance pensions for millions of government retirees and their
families, now $20 billion a year, with, at most, only minor
tweaks.

However, outsiders who have independently examined state and
local pension systems have raised red flags about potentially
hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities.

Gov. Jerry Brown, who was elected with critical union support
last year, weighed in Thursday by proposing a 12-point pension
reform plan that could, if enacted, significantly mitigate those
consequences. And he used the same word ---- "unsustainable" ----
to describe the pension dilemma.

His plan includes higher contributions from employees, higher
retirement ages, tightening of retiree eligibility for health care
and a partial shift to a 401(k)-type defined-contribution plan.

Union officials immediately denounced it, saying, in effect,
that they had already agreed to some minor changes in pension
benefits and that was enough.

All of which raises this question: Is Brown really serious, or
is he merely throwing up something that technically keeps a
campaign promise, but that he knows will be trashed by Democratic
legislators utterly beholden to the unions?

Legislators could take cover in the unions' position that "we
simply cannot stand for imposing additional retirement rollbacks on
millions of workers without bargaining."

However, the 1999 bill that hugely increased state pensions was
rushed through the Legislature without even the veneer of
collective bargaining.

In fact, the state's largest union, the California State
Employees Association, declared in a 1999 memorandum that
"retirement benefits are not part of the Dills Act (and) CSEA
should not be required to bargain for retirement benefits when the
money for these benefits is coming from the Public Employees'
Retirement Fund and not state coffers."

Only Brown, who loves political chess, knows for certain whether
pension reform is something he's willing to go to the mat to
accomplish, or just a sacrificial political pawn.

But on Thursday he listed at least a half-dozen other issues he
deems as more pressing, and his actions will speak louder than
words.